chris erdman

So many things crowd into a leader’s mind.  Consequently, leaders can be terribly absent people . . . distracted, busy, fretful, pushy.  You’ve been around such leaders, and you follow them only if you have to.  Usually the only authority they have for leading is the power of their position.  If you’re lucky you’ve also been around leaders who you’d follow anywhere.  They are rare, but we know them when we’re around them.  They have presence.  They are healers—no matter what kind of work they do.  They possess a presence of mind.

Here’s a message from Christ, inviting you into the only kind of leadership that really matters.

You are to think of nothing else,
only love.
You are to want nothing else for another,
than that they know My love.
You are to have nothing else in your mind
or heart when you are with another,
only love.

Love them.

See Me stooping,
lifting mud in my hands,
breathing life into the soul before you,
cradling them lovingly as they come to life.

Do that.

This is the kind of leadership that truly matters—whether you’re a parent dealing with a troubled teenager, an executive trying to awaken life in your management team, an artist wanting to invite others to see what you see, a politician working for the common good, a cop trying to break up a domestic fight.

Fail to do this, and you might push people around, get some stuff done, make a pile of money, build an empire.  But you’re not going to take those around you where they need to go.

Unless a leader knows loss, a leader isn’t leading.

It’s how you deal with loss that matters.

To be united with Christ in his passion means to suffer loss with him. To be united with him, you cannot wield power as the world does. Anger has no place. Controlling others is excluded. Leadership is inverted—the ways of worldly leadership are unmade. You learn to suffer rather than protect yourself, to serve rather than be served, to lose rather than win.

But to what end, what purpose?

Does the end even matter, really?

No, worry about the end and you’re already trapped.  Instead, you are to simply live as Jesus lives rather than to live conditionally—that is, attached to goals, outcomes, some self-invented-end. You are to wield only the power of secret prayer, of a heart united to Love.  You are to lead from where you are.  You are to be radically present, even to loss.  Especially to loss.

So, be present to loss, to pain.  Dare this glorious humiliation of yourself, and line yourself up with the true grain of the universe, the real current of creation’s flow.

The wireless device, a morally ambiguous piece of equipment, has become a tyrant. What Thomas Merton said in 1961 is eerily prophetic: “This becomes a kind of religious compulsion without which people cannot convince themselves that they are really alive, really ‘fulfilling their personality.’ They are not ’sinning’ but simply making asses of themselves, deluding themselves that they are real when their compulsions have reduced them to a shadow of a true person” (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 85-6).

The modern person doesn’t live by text alone, but the continuous stream of texts, Facebook updates, and tweets suggest that many, too many, of us believe that WiFi is the very air we breathe.

How many meetings are interrupted now by coworkers glancing at an incoming text? How many romantic evenings are botched by a screen lighting up? How many people must die before we learn to turn things off?

Get free.

Put the thing down for awhile.

Be human.

If you can’t, name it for what it is, an addiction, and get help.

You’ll never truly be free until you face your compulsions. Unless you can say “no” to your bodily appetites not only will you not be able to pray, but you’ll not be able to resist the maddening choices that assault you every day. Your sanity and your spiritual vitality depend on being able to resist impulsive action.

So long as you eat or drink or smoke whatever you want, so long as you indulge in whatever sensual stimulant arouses you, so long as you cannot turn off your cell phone or close down your Facebook page for awhile you’re a slave to external impulses that overshadow, abuse, and diminish your interior identity.

There are some who are hooked to texting and tweeting as disastrously as a junkies were hooked to heroine when I was young.

The keypad is their needle and wireless is their drug.

Is it yours?

Hatred’s making a come-back.  Across the board.  So easy to fall in behind this new bigotry and take part.  I ran across this today in my early reading–from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation:

“Those who cannot love feel unworthy, and at the same time feel that somehow no one is worthy.  Perhaps they cannot feel love because they think they are unworthy of love, and because of that they also think no one is worthy.  The beginning of the fight against hatred, the basic Christian response to hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible.  It is a prior commandment, to believe.  The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved. The faith that one is loved by God.  That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy–or, rather, irrespective of one’s worth!”

Nonjudgment requires humility. “Have no confidence in your own virtuousness. Do not worry about a thing once it has been done. Control your tongue and your belly” (St. Anthony).

And it requires patience, a patience that trusts that God will work all things out and that you are rarely competent to judge the path rightly. In fact, it knows that you by your own presumption will usually screw things up.

Nonjudgment, therefore, is nourished by a contemplative nonattachment to the false self.

If you’re attached to the many masks of your false or fallen self, you’ll be unable to judge rightly when necessary and instead will probably end up clobbering yourself and others.

Here’s important testimony from a reader who has lived through severe depression and offers some important advice regarding the use of medication.  Depression sufferers and their supporters, please listen to this!  (A response to my recent post: Light on Severe Depression.)

As a pastor who was hospitalized with clinical depression and anxiety and stress syndromes, I can add my personal AMEN to what you have shared, Chris.

The church certainly remains behind the eight ball on this one. In my congregation’s case (at the time), they carried out a better model. They teamed with my presbytery (regional governing body) to create a team to take care of both me and the congregaton’s ministry (liaison with the session [governing board]). The session granted me a three-month, paid leave of absence.

I had the grace, space and time to rest and get well, under the care of an excellent Christian psychotherapist and a quality psychiatrist, who found just the right medication.

Speaking of the latter–STAY WITH YOUR MEDS TO THE END OF THE REFILLS, my friends.

Thinking you’re better just because the symptoms go away is a BAD REASON to stop your meds without careful consultation with your physician(s). You’ll just dig a whole that ends up being harder to climb out of than before.

And depression sufferers: IT DOES GET BETTER. Indeed, it often takes a lot of time, hard work, and trial and error–but you’ll find God in the midst. That’s a promise fulfilled in my case!

Nonjudgment is the intentional ceding to God the sole role of judge; we refuse to take God’s judgment into human hands.

Nonjudgment lives in submission to Jesus’ explicit teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

Nonjudgment is a “paying forward” of the grace a mercy received by the sinner from Christ; by practicing nonjudgmental we preach the gospel (John 20.23). Improvising on this text, the Desert Fathers say: “When we cover a brother’s sin, God covers our sin; when we tell people about our brother’s guilt, God does the same with ours.”

This is the strange logic of the gospel–the opposite way.

We refuse to judge just as we refuse to engage in violence–so that we are vanguards, heralds, the New Adam/Eve of a wholly new way on earth and refuse to perpetuate what tearing us apart.

Every word, a meditation. No word spoken carelessly. Let the vocal chords, the lips, tongue, and teeth connect to your heart and soul—to express the reverence, joy, love, and truthfulness dwelling there. Words are sounds that create.

Every word, then, heart deep.

Slow down until you learn reverence. Listen to each word until you hear the new creation in each syllable.

Words, according to the lower standard are merely a communication tool. But words, from the higher view and when spoken from eternity, are for creation. As God spoke and brought all things into being, we, God’s prophets, speak and in his name remake the world. Adam followed God’s example in the Garden, and the New Adam, Jesus Christ, calls us to follow him in speaking the world toward its new and everlasting springtime.

Friday and Saturday, February 18-19, 2011
University Presbyterian Church, Fresno, California

Click here for a link to our PDF file of the brochure.

Living an alert spiritual life is demanding; no one can go it alone.  And in today’s world, we are hungry for meaningful personal intimacy.  Friendships not only provide us with companionship, they keep us grounded, and give us guidance along the way.  This year’s conference will focus on St. Aelred of Rievaulx and will explore biblical and historical witnesses to the gift friendship can be to the spirit.  David and Jonathan, Mary and Elizabeth, and nearer our time, JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis show us ways of joining together as soul friends as we walk the way of Christ in challenging times.

Led by Dr. Robert Hale of the New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, Dr. Steve Varvis, interim provost and historian at Fresno Pacific University, and Dr. Chris Erdman.

• Begins Friday evening the 18th, 7pm

• Saturday morning through mid-afternoon the 19th

• $35 includes lunch; please pre-register to help us plan for lunch ($45 fee at the door). Mail your check by February 15th to University Presbyterian Church, 1776 E. Roberts Ave. Fresno, CA  93710.

• Contact the church office at 559.439.8807 for more information and to register.

• Monastery Bookstore with books, candles, icons, and other handcrafts from around the world.

• Click here for a link to our PDF file of the brochure.  Please forward to friends!

This conference is open to all, so please invite a friend and spread the word.